A/N:
This is it, my faithful readers, the very final chapter. No encores,
no repeat performances. If I forgot to thank anybody, know that I
appreciate every single one of you and this has been a wonderful
experience for me.

Maggsie,
I love you. This one is for you more than the others. We're gonna
grow old together baby, you and me. Just wait and see.

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2032

Barking
and the squeals of children could be heard throughout the house as
the front door slammed for the umpteenth time that day. I didn't
need to look up from my place peeling potatoes at the sink to know
who it was- everyone else was already here. And the world wouldn't
be turning if Lizzie couldn't make a dramatic entrance.

"Everybody?"
I heard my youngest- not so young anymore, shout down the hall. "I'm
here!"

I
didn't need to wait long for the eruption and then the stampede of
feet I knew would come. "Auntie Liz! Auntie Liz!" To the world,
she was Liz now, but to Sara and I, she would always be our Lizzie.

Potato
salad for tomorrow could wait. I dried my tired hands on a handy dish
towel, and moved into the living room in time to see my daughter
waddle through the doorway, a child suction-cupped to each leg, and
one on each hip as the older children followed behind. Only one
year-old Ben was sitting on the floor not paying attention, too young
to understand that everyone's favorite aunt had finally arrived-
two and a half hours late.

"Alright,
alright," Lizzie laughed. "Everybody off! Auntie Liz needs to
breathe!" The kids scattered and my baby- my twenty-eight year old
baby crossed the room to jump into the arms of my other twenty-eight
year old baby. "Hey, big bro!" She reached up on her tip toes to
ruffle his hair and then rubbed at his scruff. "A beard. I like it.
Gives you a dangerous mystique."

"Oh,
good." Mattie rolled his eyes, "That's just what I was going
for." He bent down to ruffle her hair and she scrunched her nose at
him, brushing it back into place. They smiled as they ran through the
motions of the long established tradition.

"And
here I thought you could talk him into shaving it off." My
daughter-in-law stood up from the couch and smiled. "Hey, Liz."

"Maya,"
Lizzie opened her arms, "my favorite sister-in-law! Oh, I guess I
won't be able say that after tomorrow." She looked over her
shoulder and winked at the two women squeezed into the arm chair.

I
looked at my family- my very large family, now, spread and sprawled
all over the biggest room in the house. It had seemed full when there
were five children playing in it. But now those five children were
very much grown and it was my ten grandchildren that were
making a mess of things. Yep; ten.

Lindsay
had been a woman for a long time now; a wife and a mother at
forty-one. She and Ethan had been married for fifteen years and had
four children. Our oldest grandchild, Madison was thirteen-
completely obsessed with computers. Her brother Cameron was next at
eleven- he loved race cars and dirt bikes, a typical boy. After him
came curly-haired eight year-old Jake who dreamed of being a
professional basketball player. And last but not least was the little
blonde spitfire, Lily, who reminded me the most of Lindsay and who
would proudly announce to anyone who would listen that she was six
and a half and would be seven on October 16th.

Lindsey
had worked from their home in Washington D.C. until all of the kids
were in school, writing grant proposals and consulting for museums.
Now she was doing what she had trained to do, traveling the world one
week out of every month to identify remains on archaeological
expeditions all over the world and letting Ethan and his mother take
care of the children for a change. We could not have been more proud
of her.

Ayla
was thirty-seven now. No longer the little gap-toothed girl I
remembered falling in love with so many years ago. She'd seen her
share of hardship. After college, she took an internship with NASA,
but after a year decided that she was no longer interested in the
space aspect and was much more passionate about biology. So she went
to graduate school where she met and fell in love with Dr. Hugo
Barron, a professor, and a genius in his own right. He was nearly
twenty years older than she, but they cared for each other a great
deal and when Ayla was twenty six they were married.

They
got pregnant right away, and the following year our grandson Isaac
was born. When he was just three months old, his father had a heart
attack that put him in the hospital, severely weakened. He never
left. After two months he suffered another attack, slipped into a
coma and a week later, died. My poor Ayla was heart broken, and if it
wasn't bad enough, when Isaac was a year old the doctor informed us
that he was deaf. Thankfully, it could be corrected with implants,
and someday, surgery, but at the time it had been a devastating blow
to Ayla- she completely blamed herself.

Ayla
was always the serious one, the literal and realistic one, and when
her husband died, she seemed to lose all of the energy and drive she
had had when she was younger. For a long time, she immersed herself
in Isaac's upbringing and made no effort to reach out. She started
home schooling him when he was very young. When he was five, she
realized that just like she had been, Isaac would be out of place in
a class of his peers and that's how she got the idea for the
school. Using the money her fathers left her she began a school for
gifted children. It began with four students in a small house with
she as the only teacher. Five years later she was the principal of a
private school with over one hundred students, twelve teachers and
newly finished, state of the art facilities. And Isaac had never felt
left out or different from any other child. He had those big brown
eyes I have a certain weakness for, and he was quick to laugh and
smile, making him easy to love.

Maggie.
Always the actress. Maggie had dropped out of college when she was
nineteen after landing a big part in an off Broadway play. That part
led to a bigger part which led to a bigger part which led to Broadway
and the supporting role in a very successful musical. And she did
that for six years until she was sacked because she was no longer
young enough for the part. Deciding she had had enough of city life,
Maggie returned to college to get a degree in education. Five years
ago she took a job as a drama teacher at a high school in Vermont.
And that is where she met Stacy.

Stacy
was an art teacher and a freelance painter and photographer. She was
a pixie of a woman with a dazzling smile and a sense of humor as dry
as Sara's- and she fit into our family effortlessly as did her two
children, Ruby and Max. She and Maggie became immediate friends when
they met and when Stacy's husband beat her into a hospital bed,
Maggie was there to pick up the pieces. Four years and a very final
divorce later, Stacy bought Maggie a diamond ring.

It
only took thirty years and four different presidents- including our
first African-American president and our first woman president, but
gay marriage was finally legal in all fifty states, effective on
April 22nd, 2032- which was the following day. So we were
having a wedding- the fourth in our family. Eight year-old Ruby was
quick to point out that now she and five year-old Max would be our
real grandchildren, but we had considered them our family from
the moment we met them. Ruby was smart as a whip and never missed a
chance to prove it, and Max was a sweetheart, always trying to make
people smile.

Jamie,
Max's cousin, was also five years old. She loved horses, and had
just started riding lessons. Her younger brothers were Ty who was
four and our youngest grandchild, baby Ben. Mattie and Maya had
started having children young, but then again, they had started
everything young.

A
few weeks after my surprise fifty-fifth birthday party, Warrick was
hired to take over my old job as administrative supervisor- the
sneaky guy hadn't even told us he had applied for the position. But
he had, and he and his family moved out to San Francisco that summer.
Maya went to the same school as Mattie and Lizzie, so most days she
came home on the bus with them and did her homework with the twins
until one of her parents could come to get her. It became very clear
right away that she and Mattie had unmistakable chemistry- but it
still took Mattie a year to work up the courage to ask her out. And
except for one dramatic month in high school, they had been together
ever since.

They
were married the summer after Maya's college graduation- a degree
in architecture, Mattie's was in civil engineering, and while they
had intended to wait a few years to have children, it seemed that
fate had other plans.

Warrick
had been so proud. Of his daughter. Of his grandchildren. He would
pull out his wallet and show pictures to anyone and everyone. He was
there, in a wheel chair, the day his third grandchild was born. Maya
and Mattie were going to name him Christopher. But when Warrick held
him in his arms he disagreed, "No," he said, "This little man
is a Benjamin. Like his great-grandfather. Mark my words. This boy is
a Ben."

They
had been doing chemotherapy for months, but it didn't matter- the
cancer had been too advanced by the time they finally got the
diagnosis right. When he died, two days later, with all of us in his
room, he died a happy man, and despite all the pain he must have
felt, he had a smile on his face. "I always did have all the good
luck," he told us, before his body relaxed and he was gone. He was
only sixty-five.

Nick
was at the funeral. It was the first time I had seen him in ten
years- since he moved back to Texas to take over his father's
business. Greg was there too, now a criminology professor with one
kid in high school and one in college; too old to be wearing his rock
and roll t-shirts and old enough that he didn't give a damn. Gil
did not come. He wasn't traveling much anymore, he was spending
most of his days in a retirement community in Florida where he was
considered a very handsome catch by all the old widows and continued
to write. We exchanged Christmas cards- Sara gave him a phone call
now and then, but that was the extent of our contact, the old days of
deep friendship nothing but a faded memory now.

Lizzie
was our only child who had yet to find her way. She dropped out of
college her senior year to follow a boyfriend across the country,
only to break up with him months later. She had worked in countless
jobs; medical secretary, commercial fisherwoman, cocktail waitress,
and club DJ to name a few. Now she was a bartender in a bar downtown.
I'd lost count of the tattoos and different hair colors, although
she was now back to her natural red. But she had always been a free
spirit, a wild child. So as much as I, we, worried about her, I knew
that she would be fine. It had always taken her a bit longer than the
others to get her footing, but when she did, she dazzled the world.

My
thoughts were interrupted by the long familiar feeling of a hand in
mine. I looked down. Our hands had changed over the years, the
creases had deepened and our skin was mottled with age spots. I
looked up. Liquid brown eyes met mine. The eyes of my daughter and my
grandson, the eyes of my wife; the eyes I fell in love with all those
years ago. They would never change. She smiled at me and lead me to
the dinner table. Chairs were crowded around, and there was a
separate table for the younger children. I watched as the food
warming in the oven was brought to the table and everyone took their
seats. Mattie came out of the kitchen with two bottles of champagne.
He handed one to Sara and opened the other himself. We all cheered
and applauded as they erupted. Sara poured hers and then mine before
passing it along. She stood, raising her glass.

"A
toast!" She grinned, "First to Maggie and Tracy and Ruby and
Max!" She nodded in their direction. "You are a beautiful family
already, and tomorrow is just a day to celebrate that. Maggie, your
mother and I are so happy that you have found someone to love and
spend the rest of your life with- and even happier that she's
someone we can honestly love too. Tracy, Ruby, and Max, I want to
officially welcome you to the Sidle-Willows, Barron, Brown,
Holzman-Winger, Williams clan! We are completely chaotic and crazy
and we like it that way!" There came another round of cheers. "And
we can only hope that you learn to love us as mush as we already love
you. Cheers!"

"Cheers!"
We all drank.

"And
now a toast to Catherine, Mom, Gigi, whatever you call her, a toast
to my amazing lover of thirty years."

I
raised an eyebrow in confusion. She just smiled and winked, then
reached into her pocket and pulled out a small blue velvet box. She
held it out to me. Inside was a ring. A diamond ring. I looked up at
her. "Sar?"

"I
don't want to steel the thunder of the brides to be, but I know we
never had a proper engagement, and as of tomorrow we can finally get
that tax deduction." She beamed. "So what do you say, Gigi? Think
you can find it in your heart to marry this old Nana? Again?"

I
stared at the ring and then back at Sara. I smirked, "Thirty years
and you really have to ask? Maybe you're not as sharp as I thought
you were, Sidle." I pulled on her wrist and she slid into her seat.
I pressed my forehead against hers. "Thirty years and you're
still full of surprises." I kissed her sweetly.

She
looked into my eyes and in a hushed voice she sang, "So I would
choose to be with you, that's if the choice were mine to make. But
you can make decisions too…and you can have this heart to break."

"Hey,
Mom!" Maggie hollered across the table. "Will you just say yes
already?"

"Yeah,
not to interrupt your ten millionth embarrassing make out session,
but the food is getting cold!"

"I
like it when Nana and Gigi kiss! It's romantic!"

"Trust
me, once they've kissed each other in front of all your friends,
your friends' parents, your teachers, not to mention probably
thousands of complete strangers, it loses its charm."

"I'd
rather they kiss too much than not at all."

"I
think it's sweet to still be so in love after so long."

"I'm
never going to fall in love."

"Every
ten year-old boy says that."

"Yeah
well, I mean it."

"Maddie,
throw me a roll would you?"

"Okay,
which one of these lasagnas is vegetarian?"

"The
one with spinach, stupid! You know, all that green stuff."

"Don't
call your cousin stupid!"

"But
he is stupid compared to me. I bet he doesn't even know geometry."

"Who
has the yams? I specifically asked for yams."

"So,
Liz, you seeing anybody?"

"Why
do we always talk about my love life?"

"We're
boring and married. We live vicariously through you."

"What's
vicariously?"

"You
guys have been boring and married since we were fourteen."

"Mom,
can I spend the summer with Nana and Gigi? Nana is going to teach me
how to surf!"

Sara's
eyes locked onto mine and we both grinned. This was our life. And it
was pretty darn great. She kissed me again before refilling my glass
of champagne. "To our children." She whispered, her voice somehow
drowning out the commotion.

I
nodded, "And their children."

"To
us."

"And
wedded bliss."

"To
the next thirty years."

"May
they be as beautiful and incredible as the last."

And
they were.

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That's
it, everybody. Thank you all so much- and if you liked this, then
turn on my author alert, because there's a lot more to come. I'm
just full of ideas- nothing quite this long, but hopefully just as
good.